Recently, home electric appliances, electric devices, and the like, have been significantly progressed, with new products developed and sold day after day. For example, in a television field, products that can receive a variety of television broadcasts, including satellite broadcast and cable television as well as conventional terrestrial broadcast, are increasing. In addition, set-top boxes that can be connected to a television and display/output a variety of content on the television, are increasingly available including a possibility of browsing of the Internet, mail-ordering, and doing karaoke.
As the home electric appliances, such as a television, offer an increasing range of functions and even more sophisticated functionalities as described above, remote control devices for carrying out operations and controls of the appliances (hereafter, referred to as the “remote control device” or as the “remocon”, which is a Japanese word that contracts the words “remote” and “control”) tend to have more operation buttons and become larger in size, while the operation procedures become complicated.
However, a large remote control device has a problem in which it is hard to hold and gives low affinity for users. Further, due to the large number of operation buttons and complicated operation procedures, it is hard for users to understand which button to press to get a desired operation and takes time to become familiar with operations of the remote control device.
To solve such problems, there is proposed a remote control device such as the one in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-81743. The remote control device disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-81743 has a shape in which three generally flat plates are connected and the cross-section shape through the connected direction forms generally arched shape. Having such a shape allows a user to perform operations in an effortless position when the user operates with one hand. Also, an operation unit for instructing operations according to a first objective (control of an information processing application) is disposed on the surfaces of top sides of the flat plates disposed of both sides of the remote control device, and an operation unit for instructing operations according to a second objective (control of normal television broadcast and data broadcast) is disposed on the surface of the bottom side of the middle flat plate. Due to such a structure, holding positions of the remote control device are different between the first and the second objectives, which allows a user to operate multifunctional control-subject apparatuses with easier manipulation than the conventional way.
However, with Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-81743, there is a problem in which, although it is easy to understand which side should be used to operate the user's target control, it requires a user considerable time to learn and understand which operation button should be pressed when performing an actual operation, due to a large number of operation buttons and wheels on both sides of the remote control device.
Further, if a conventional remote control device including the one in Japanese Patent Application Publication No. 2007-81743 is used to control an apparatus compatible with cable television, multi-channel satellite broadcast, and terrestrial digital broadcast, a menu is first required to be shown on a television screen, and from that menu, a user should reach a target operation instruction screen while proceeding the hierarchical structure. This requires the user to perform complicated operational procedures to get the desired operation done.
The invention was devised in consideration of the above points and aims to achieve a technical subject that is to provide a remote control device with excellent convenience, operability and affinity, which allows intuitive operation and requires less time for learning operation.